It started innocently enough. There I was,
drinking a cup of coffee and enjoying the spring sunshine when a little voice
whispered in my ear: "Here, try one of these". I suppose it was curiousity at
first. I mean, how much damage could it do, I asked myself? I thought, as we
all do, that I could handle it. I was, after all, hardly young and innocent;
I'd been around a bit, I thought, and there wasn't much left in this world that
could corrupt and deprave me. Now, of course, I know the truth.

At first, it was just a couple of
Shipman's. You know, pretty lightweight stuff, the sort of things of which you
can put away a dozen or so without really thinking about it. Then someone
offered me a pheasant tail pattern and a couple of suspender buzzers. All still
pretty manageable, really; I was fine,
still sleeping well, still
getting out into the world and meeting people. But then came the parties where
people were handing around soldier palmers, Coves, damsel nymphs; and suddenly
and quite literally, I found myself in a world of vice.
Before I knew it I was getting through an ounce of seal's fur every week. And I
didn't stop there. In the following months I developed a serious tinsel habit;
I found myself lurking outside reservoir lodges trying to score coastal deer
hair, dyed partridge feathers, even (and I shudder as I type this) type 4 CDC
plumes. I was a mess, my dreams full of giant man-eating muddlers and
appetisers, my fingers shaking at the vice every morning as I got my fix with
the first sedge pupa of the day.

This week I finally realised the full
extent of my depravity. In a sort of varnish-induced haze, I found myself
showing a friend how to tie a superglue
buzzer, that most evil and insidiously satisfying of patterns, and I knew
that I had to stop before I did someone else the same damage that had been done
to me. So here I stand before you, a broken man; but a man who has woken up to
the lies and deception that fly-tying forces upon you, and a man in search of a
twelve-step program for victims of this vicious business.

You may recall that several weeks ago, I
wrote about the Three
Great Lies and a proposed replacement for the third of them. But
fly-fishing has shown me that there are many more fibs out there that must be
exposed; in particular, the notion that tying your own flies saves you money. I
feel somewhat churlish about revealing this, especially at a time when
Sexyloops' very own Ben Spinks is doing such sterling work in explaining the
ins and outs of fly-tying to us all
on these pages, and
showing us the the
deperate lengths to which a man will go to acquire materials.
But the awful truth must be revealed, I'm afraid, before others are as
corrupted by it as I have become.

I just had a quick scan of my materials cabinet and I reckon that at a
conservative estimate, the tools and materials I have gathered in the last
year or so have cost me about £500. Not too bad, I hear you say; at an
average of 90 pence each for commercial versions tied by underpaid Kenyans and Thais,
you only have to tie 556 or so to get your money back, right? Well, yes and no.
The problem, of course, is that this only works as long as you restrict
yourself forever to tying the patterns that your materials allow. So while I
have marabou in half a dozen shades, a collection of seal's fur that makes even
the most spectacular rainbow look like a muddy driveway and a mink pelt that
would look pretty damn good around a supermodel's neck,
I still don't have most of the stuff that I need as my skills evolve and my
insane lust for new patterns grows.

Last week, for example, I decided I needed
to learn to tie some Invictas.
The Invicta seems to me to be an excellent all-rounder, representing all sorts
of buggy and edible creatures. You can tie it slim or bushy, silver or gold,
large or small; you can fish it wet or dry; and you'll catch fish whichever
way, on the Wylie or the Waiau.
But you need some serious gear to tie it. A couple of different kinds of
pheasant, only one one of which I have. Red game cock hackle, with some blue
jay for the throat — the first I can do, but the jay is currently beyond the
scope of my collection. So just to tie up a few of these essential patterns, I
need to spend a tenner or more before I can even think about getting started.
And while I'm out shopping, I'll
invariably find something else I need; that Greenwell's cape I've been
promising myself, some olive nymph skin, a new pair of hackle pliers, a proper
hair stacker to replace the Biro tube I've been using. So that tenner turns
into thirty or forty or even fifty pounds; all for the sake of a few
trichopteran lookalikes that will probably do no better a job that my existing
deer-hair sedges.

And so it goes on. Parachute Adams? I need
muskrat fur and calftail. Snipe and purple? I need snipe wing and, well, purple
stuff. Don't even get me started on poppers or naturals or fry imitations or
Powersilk or.... You can see where I'm going with this. The more curious you
get and the better you get at it, the more it costs you and the less time you
have to actually go fishing, or see your girlfriend, or do any work. The
horrible truth is this: whatever Ben or Paul tell you, fly-tying ruins your
life. Just Say No, while you can; and think of me this evening, as I roam the
streets of London looking for a deal on a kilo of possum fur. It's not for me,
officer, it's for a friend...

Sean Geer (sean@fishmail.co.uk) is a freelance journalist, author and
tinsel addict. He is an expert in not catching fish on any of his
home-tied flies, preferring to steal better examples from the fly-boxes of
his fishing partners whenever possible. As absentee co-moderator of the
Sexyloops fly-tying forum, he has failed spectacularly to contribute
anything worthwhile to the global body of knowledge on this subject. None
of this has stopped him from accumulating the world's largest and most
pointless collection of dubbing materials. He is currently writing a novel
about sex, fluorocarbon and the life cycle of chironomid insects.